AAAS News & Notes

Lesson on interference. In a demonstration of the "Stroop effect," both ink color and meaning affect viewers' perception of words. A WINDOW ON OURSELVES AND OTHERS Do people in different cultures have the same emotions? What's the value of daydreams? And how do young children understand the world around them? Visitors to AAAS can explore these and other aspects of human behavior in an interactive exhibit now installed at the new headquarters building in downtown Washington, D.C. "Psychology: It's More Than You Think! " is part of a larger traveling exhibition developed by the American Psychological Association (a AAAS affiliate) and the Ontario Science Center. The activities­many designed for two people­give insight into concepts such as language and communication, cooperation versus competition, imagination, gender bias, and personality traits. Some explain tools and methods of psychological research, such as the display on PET (positron emission tomography) images and how they record internal brain activity. The free exhibit is the first of many educational displays that will be featured in specially designed public spaces of the AAAS building at 1200 New York Avenue NW. Local volunteers are needed to help school groups and other visitors enjoy and learn from the psychology exhibit. If you live in the Washington area and want to volunteer, call Jane Privé at 202-326-6786 or send a message to Jerry Bell at: jbell@aaas.org.

GROUPS SEEK TO REDUCE ERRORS IN HEALTH CARE At a pioneering conference convened this month by AAAS and several other groups, two leading health care organizations announced initiatives aimed at enhancing patient safety and preventing controllable errors that occur during medical care and treatment. As the conference, "Examining Errors in Health Care," opened on 13 October, the American Medical Association (AMA) said it will establish a National Patient Safety Foundation to promote collaborative error-reduction efforts in the health care community. Nancy Dickey, M.D., chair of the AMA Board of Trustees, said, "In today's health care environment, we are all accountable and must work together." At the same time, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) announced that it will implement an "accreditation watch" policy for the thousands of institutions nationwide that it monitors and certifies for quality assurance. Under the new policy, JCAHO will "flag" an institution if on-site evaluation reveals an incident of patient death or serious injury that may have been prevented; the institution must then conduct a thorough analysis of how the incident happened and implement systematic changes to prevent future ocurrences. "No one, be it an individual or an organization, is immune to errors, but we believe strongly that accreditation must become an increasingly effective risk-reduction activity," said the president of JCAHO, Dennis O'Leary, M.D. The AMA and JCAHO co-sponsored the conference, along with AAAS and the Annenberg Center for Health Sciences, which is based at Eisenhower Memorial Hospital in Rancho Mirage, California. The Annenberg Center hosted the event, which drew more than 300 participants who included medical practitioners, researchers, health care managers, lawyers, ethicists, patient advocacy representatives, and safety experts from a variety of sectors. AAAS's Scientific Freedom, Responsibility, and Law Program helped organize the 3-day conference. More than 50 presentations covered a wide range of topics related to health care errors, including education and training of personnel, communication strategies, legal issues, human and organizational factors, and the occurrence and reduction of errors in specific areas such as diagnosis, medication, and anesthesia. One panel focused on an actual case of medical error to highlight the emotional, legal, ethical, and professional issues that arise from an incident that has tragic consequences. AAAS senior program associate Deborah Runkle said one major focus of the conference was that the health care community might learn lessons about safety and error reduction from other high-risk sectors, such as aviation, industrial engineering, and nuclear power. Among the speakers, for example, were John Nance, an airline captain and aviation lawyer who serves as a correspondent for ABC television, and sociologist Diane Vaughan of Boston College, whose book The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture and Deviance at NASA was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. In his keynote address, Lucian Leape, M.D., of the Harvard School of Public Health echoed a central theme of the conference by calling for health care institutions to shift their focus in error prevention from punishing people to correcting systems. He noted that although much is known about how to decrease errors, "hospitals have been locked into a 'crime and punishment' approach ... that is directed at individuals instead of the real root causes of errors-faulty systems." Leape, a former pediatric surgeon who has written and lectured widely on errors in medicine, also is leading an error-prevention initiative for the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. He hailed the conference as a much needed forum "to get people to talk to one another and then go home and implement proven remedies." The sponsoring organizations said they expected the conference to generate recommendations about actions that various segments of the health care industry could adopt to reduce errors. For more information, visit the conference Web site at or contact Deborah Runkle at AAAS, by phone at 202-326-6794 or drunkle@aaas.org. Back to the AAAS News & Notes Directory

AAAS MEMBERS DISTINGUISHED FOR CONTRIBUTIONS TO SCIENCE

In September the AAAS Council elected 283 members as Fellows of AAAS. These individuals will be recognized for their contributions to science at the Fellows Forum to be held on 15 February 1997 during the AAAS Annual Meeting in Seattle, Washington. The new Fellows will receive a certificate and a blue and gold rosette pin as a symbol of their distinguished accomplishments. Presented by section affiliation, they are:

Agriculture, Food, and Renewable Resources

Leon H. Allen, Jr., USDA-ARS, Univ. of Florida

H. Roger Boerma, Univ. of Georgia

Francis F. Busta, Univ. of Minnesota

Wanda W. Collins, The World Bank

Dennis D. Focht, Univ. of California, Riverside

A. E. Freeman, Iowa State Univ.

Clifford J. Gabriel, Office of Science and Technology Policy

John Letey Jr., Univ. of California, Riverside

William J. Mitsch, Ohio State Univ.

Albert L. Page, Univ. of California, Riverside

Hugo H. Rogers, USDA-ARS, National Soil Dynamics Lab.

Morris Soller, The Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem

Neal K. Van Alfen, Texas A&M Univ.

Lawrence P. Wilding, Texas A&M Univ.

Anthropology

Michael H. Crawford, Univ. of Kansas

Jere D. Haas, Cornell Univ.

Allen Johnson, Univ. of California, Los Angeles

Patrick V. Kirch, Univ. of California, Berkeley

Carlos G. Velez-Ibanez, Univ. of California, Riverside

Astronomy

Claude R. Canizares, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Louis D. Friedman, The Planetary Society

Martha L. Hazen, Harvard College Observatory

Sidney van den Bergh, Dominion Astrophysical Observatory, Victoria

Atmospheric and Hydrospheric Sciences

Ferdinand Baer, Univ. of Maryland

Rana A. Fine, Univ. of Miami

Carl A. Friehe, Univ. of California, Irvine

Mark R. Schoeberl, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Biological Sciences

James W. Ammerman, National Science Foundation

Dorairajan Balasubramanian, Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, India

David L. Balkwill, Florida State Univ.

John A. Beardmore, Univ. of Wales

Joel Berger, Univ. of Nevada

Gene D. Block, Univ. of Virginia

Brian W. Bowen, Univ. of Florida

Robert A. Browne, Wake Forest Univ.

William B. Busa, Johns Hopkins Univ.

Cheryl Ann Butman, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Colleen M. Cavanaugh, Harvard Univ.

Joseph J. Cech Jr., Univ. of California, Davis

Kerry B. Clark, Florida Institute of Technology

Jonathan J. Cole, Institute of Ecosystem Studies

Murray P. Deutscher, Univ. of Miami

Laurence D. Etkin, Univ. of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center

E. Imre Friedmann, Florida State Univ.

Greta A. Fryxell, Univ. of Texas

Jed A. Fuhrman, Univ. of Southern California

Darrell J. Grimes, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Glenn I. Hatton, Univ. of California, Riverside

Raymond L. Hayes, Howard Univ.

Samuel B. Horowitz, Ann Arbor, MI

Jerome A. Jackson, Mississippi State Univ.

Peter R. Jutro, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Robert J. Marquis, Univ. of Missouri

Kathleen Shive Matthews, Rice Univ.

Steven G. Morgan, State Univ. of New York, Stony Brook

William E. Newton, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State Univ.

Lewis W. Oring, Univ. of Nevada

Valerie J. Paul, Univ. of Guam

Esther C. Peters, Tetra Tech, Inc.

Theodore W. Pietsch, Univ. of Washington

David Malcolm Potts, Univ. of California, Berkeley

Donald C. Potts, Univ. of California, Santa Cruz

Janardan K. Reddy, Northwestern Univ. Medical School

Gene E. Robinson, Univ. of Illinois

James E. Rodman, National Science Foundation

Gene Rosenberg, Smithsonian Institution

Robert M. Sapolsky, Stanford Univ.

Dipak Kumar Sarkar, Washington State Univ.

Michael A. Savageau, Univ. of Michigan

Richard M. Schultz, Univ. of Pennsylvania

Sidney A. Simon, Duke Univ. Medical Center

Donald B. Siniff, Univ. of Minnesota

Anthony J. Sinskey, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Ronald K. Sizemore, Univ. of North Carolina

Anna Marie Skalka, Fox Chase Cancer Center

Michael B. Stemerman, Univ. of California, Riverside

Diane K. Stoecker, Univ. of Maryland

Barrie F. Taylor, Univ. of Miami

Gary H. Thorgaard, Washington State Univ.

Jolinda A. Traugh, Univ. of California, Riverside

Charles M. Wahle, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Larry L. Wolf, Syracuse Univ.

David Michael Young, Univ. of Florida

Chemistry

David L. Allara, Pennsylvania State Univ.

David Avnir, The Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem

Phaedon Avouris, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center

Vincenzo Balzani, Univ. of Bologna

Helen M. Berman, Rutgers Univ.

Kenneth J. Breslauer, Rutgers Univ.

Larry A. Curtiss, Argonne National Lab.

Edward L. Cussler, Univ. of Minnesota

Ken A. Dill, Univ. of California, San Francisco

Roger M. Freidinger, Merck Research Labs.

Michael E. Garst, Allergan

Gunda I. Georg, Univ. of Kansas

George W. Gokel, Washington Univ.

John B. Goodenough, Univ. of Texas

William C. Harris, National Science Foundation

Adam Heller, Univ. of Texas

Ronald A. Hites, Indiana Univ.

Paul B. Hopkins, Univ. of Washington

Ronald H. Kluger, Univ. of Toronto

Charles M. Lieber, Harvard Univ.

David A. Lightner, Univ. of Nevada

Koji Nakanishi, Columbia Univ.

Ryoji Noyori, Nagoya Univ.

George W. Parshall, Wilmington, DE

David N. Reinhoudt, Univ. of Twente

Reuben D. Rieke, Univ. of Nebraska

Bengt Samuelsson, Karolinska Institute

Kenneth Showalter, West Virginia Univ.

Thomas T. Tidwell, Univ. of Toronto

Thomas D. Tullius, Johns Hopkins Univ.

Charles L. Wilkins, Univ. of California, Riverside

Itamar Willner, The Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem

Dentistry

Marc W. Heft, Univ. of Florida

Education

Jerry A. Bell, AAAS

Joseph D. McInerney, Biological Sciences Curriculum Study

Gerald Skoog, Texas Tech Univ.

Engineering

Stephen J. Burges, Univ. of Washington

James J. Coleman, Univ. of Illinois

David L. DiLaura, Univ. of Colorado

Chester S. Gardner, Univ. of Illinois

Arthur W. Guy, Univ. of Washington

Judson M. Harper, Colorado State Univ.

Edgar C. Hayden, Southwest Research Institute

Thomas J. R. Hughes, Stanford Univ.

James K. Knowles, California Institute of Technology

Ray B. Krone, Univ. of California, Davis

Robert E. Nickell, Applied Science and Technology

Julio M. Ottino, Northwestern Univ.

Mervyn Lea Rudee, Univ. of California, Riverside

Willy Z. Sadeh, Colorado State Univ.

Roland Schinzinger, Univ. of California, Irvine

Charles A. Sleicher, Univ. of Washington

Edwin B. Stear, Boeing Co.

Larry W. Sumney, Semiconductor Research Corp.

General Interest in Science and Engineering

Gene R. Kritsky, College of Mount St. Joseph

Dudley F. Peeler Jr., Univ. of Mississippi

Horst R. Wittmann, Air Force Office of Scientific Research

Geology and Geography

Anthony J. Brazel, Arizona State Univ.

Adam M. Dziewonski, Harvard Univ.

Russell W. Graham, Illinois State Museum

Harry W. Green, II, Univ. of California, Riverside

David G. Howell, U.S. Geological Survey

Daniel B. Luten Jr., Berkeley, CA

Thomas V. McEvilly, Univ. of California, Berkeley

Raymond A. Price, Queen's Univ.

Richard S. Williams Jr., U.S. Geological Survey

History and Philosophy of Science

Paul L. Farber, Oregon State Univ.

Jane Maienschein, Arizona State Univ.

Industrial Science and Technology

David Roessner, Georgia Institute of Technology

Barry G. Silverman, George Washington Univ.

Information, Computing, and Communication

Narendra Ahuja, Univ. of Illinois

Rodney A. Brooks, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Peter Calingaert, Univ. of North Carolina

Francois Coallier, Bell Canada

Judith Messerle, Harvard Medical School

John E. Savage, Brown Univ.

Linguistics and Language Science

Lila R. Gleitman, Univ. of Pennsylvania

Barbara H. Partee, Univ. of Massachusetts

Mathematics

Richard A. Askey, Univ. of Wisconsin

Deborah Tepper Haimo, Univ. of California, San Diego

Lee Lorch, York Univ.

M. M. Rao, Univ. of California, Riverside

Mark Saul, New York City

Hari M. Srivastava, Univ. of Victoria

Medical Sciences

Burton M. Altura, SUNY Health Science Center, Brooklyn

George J. Annas, Boston Univ.

Arthur K. Asbury, Univ. of Pennsylvania

W. Gerald Austen, Massachusetts General Hospital

Eugene A. Bauer, Stanford Univ.

William S. Beck, Massachusetts General Hospital

Ellis S. Benson, Univ. of Minnesota

Emile L. Boulpaep, Yale Univ.

Henry R. Bourne, Univ. of California, San Francisco

Michael J. Buchmeier, Scripps Research Institute

Edwin C. Cadman, Yale-New Haven Hospital

Charles C.J. Carpenter, Brown Univ.

Francis V. Chisari, Scripps Research Institute

Thomas S. Edgington, Scripps Research Institute

Stanley Falkow, Stanford Univ.

Philip J. Fialkow, Univ. of Washington

Arthur L. Frank, Univ. of Texas Health Center

Emil J. Freireich, Univ. of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center

Robert S. Fujinami, Univ. of Utah

Barbara A. Gilchrest, Boston Univ.

Marvin Goldman, Univ. of California, Davis

Joe W. Gray, Univ. of California, San Francisco

Diane Edmund Griffin, Johns Hopkins Univ.

Evelyn V. Hess, Univ. of Cincinnati Medical Center

Edward W. Holmes, Univ. of Pennsylvania

Richard C. Horton, The Lancet

R. Rodney Howell, Univ. of Miami

Harry S. Jacob, Univ. of Minnesota

Thomas N. James, Univ. of Texas Medical Branch

Peter Jatlow, Yale Univ.

Richard T. Johnson, Johns Hopkins Univ.

Keith A. Joiner, Yale Univ.

Robert J. Joynt, Univ. of Rochester

Albert Z. Kapikian, National Institutes of Health

Edward L. Kaplan, Univ. of Minnesota

Michael Kashgarian, Yale Univ.

Dennis L. Kasper, Harvard Medical School

William L. Kissick, Univ. of Pennsylvania

Mark A. Knepper, National Institutes of Health

Anthony L. Komaroff, Brigham and Women's Hospital

Leopold G. Koss, Montefiore Medical Center

Calvin M. Kunin, Ohio State Univ.

Paul H. Lambert, World Health Organization

Robert J. Levine, Yale Univ.

Donald A. B. Lindberg, National Library of Medicine

James R. Lupski, Baylor College of Medicine

M. R. Malinow, Oregon Regional Primate Research Center

Vincent T. Marchesi, Yale Univ.

Phyllis J. McAlpine, Univ. of Manitoba

Mortimer L. Mendelsohn, Lawrence Livermore National Lab.

L. Gabriel Navar, Tulane Univ.

Richard S. Rivlin, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center

Priscilla A. Schaffer, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Sondra Schlesinger, Washington Univ.

Robert D. Schreiber, Washington Univ.

Robert B. Tesh, Univ. of Texas Medical Branch

Carl W. Tyler Jr., Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Bert L. Vallee, Harvard Medical School

J. Craig Venter, Institute for Genomic Research

Jerry S. Wolinsky, Univ. of Texas

Yusuke Yanagi, Kyushu Univ.

George S. Zubenko, Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic

Dorothea Zucker-Franklin, New York Univ. Medical Center

Neuroscience

Albert J. Aguayo, McGill Univ.

Fred H. Gage, Salk Institute for Biological Studies

Harvey J. Karten, Univ. of California, San Diego

Marcus E. Raichle, Washington Univ.

Carla J. Shatz, Univ. of California, Berkeley

Pharmaceutical Sciences

Michael B. Bolger, Univ. of Southern California

John R. Cashman, Seattle Biomedical Research Institute

Ping I. Lee, Schering-Plough Research Institute

Patrick J. McNamara, Univ. of Kentucky

Popat Narayan Patil, Ohio State Univ.

James L. Stevens, W. Alton Jones Cell Science Center

Physics

Boris W. Batterman, Cornell Univ.

Stephen G. Bishop, Univ. of Illinois

Harvey A. Buckmaster, Univ. of Victoria

Robert J. Celotta, National Institute of Standards and Technology

Bunny C. Clark, Ohio State Univ.

Laura H. Greene, Univ. of Illinois

Randall G. Hulet, Rice Univ.

Anthony M. Johnson, New Jersey Institute of Technology

Frank C. Jones, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Kate P. Kirby, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Ken G. Libbrecht, California Institute of Technology

Christopher F. McKee, Univ. of California, Berkeley

John T. Moseley, Univ. of Oregon

Roger Pynn, Los Alamos National Lab.

Leon J. Radziemski, Washington State Univ.

Anthony F. Starace, Univ. of Nebraska

H. Henry Stroke, New York Univ.

Herbert F. York, Univ. of California, San Diego

Psychology

William F. Brewer, Univ. of Illinois

Gordon M. Burghardt, Univ. of Tennessee

David W. Fulker, Univ. of Colorado

Irving I. Gottesman, Univ. of Virginia

Leonard Katz, Univ. of Connecticut

Roberta L. Klatzky, Carnegie-Mellon Univ.

Delbert D. Thiessen, Univ. of Texas

Lee Willerman, Univ. of Texas

Social, Economic, and Political Sciences

Ronald J. Angel, Univ. of Texas

Thomas Dietz, George Mason Univ.

Valerie K. Oppenheimer, Univ. of California, Los Angeles

Paul A. Samuelson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Albert P. Williams, RAND

Societal Impacts of Science and Engineering

Peter D. Blair, Sigma, Xi, The Scientific Research Society

Jennifer Sue Bond, National Science Foundation

E. William Colglazier Jr., National Academy of Sciences

Michael A. Kamrin, Michigan State Univ.

G. H. Miller, Edinboro, PA

Judith P. Swazey, The Acadia Institute

Statistics

Joel B. Greenhouse, Carnegie-Mellon Univ.

David Hoel, Univ. of South Carolina

Thomas A. Louis, Univ. of Minnesota

Kenneth W. Wachter, Univ. of California, Berkeley